As communication devices, such as mobile telephones, and communication networks become increasing sophisticated there are an increasing number of communication services being offered to consumers. Such communication services include short message system (SMS) messaging, multimedia messaging (MMS), instant messaging (IM), push-to-talk (PTT), and the like.
In order for a communication device, such as a mobile telephone, to be able to provide access to such communication services a mobile telephone typically needs to have a corresponding client application installed thereon. The client application provides a user interface to the service as well as a suitable interface for communicating with a network based server application providing the service.
Once a mobile telephone has been designed and manufactured, it is expensive for the network operators and the handset manufacturers to modify the software applications present thereon to accommodate improved services or improved functionality. Thus, from an economic point of view at least, it is somewhat undesirable to provide upgrades to existing mobile telephones, unless it is deemed that the improvements represent a significant revenue source or provide substantial benefits for the network operator or the handset manufacturer.
The communication services available to mobile telephone users may be divided broadly into two categories: session-based and session-less services. For example, SMS and MMS are considered as session-less communication services. In other words, a user may send an SMS message to one or more other users, or may receive an SMS from one or more other users. However, each message sent or received is treated independently, and there is no concept of a ‘session’ between separate SMS messages, for example. Other communication services, however, such as push-to-talk, are session-based. For example, a push-to-talk session exists between multiple users when a push-to-talk communication is established until the push-to-talk communication is terminated.
Generally, as communication services become more sophisticated users demand higher levels of functionality and interoperability between different communication services. For instance, it may be desirable that users of session-based communication services be able to ‘share’ details of the session with another session-based or session-less communication service. For example, a user in a push-to-talk session may wish to, whilst participating in the push-to-talk session, send an SMS message to each of the current participants to the session. However, there is currently no easy way to achieve this. The only current known way is for the user to manually determine the current participants of the PTT session using the PTT client application, and to manually address an SMS message to each of the determined participants using an SMS client application. This is particularly inconvenient to the user, especially where the number of users in a session is large, and where the users in a session may join and leave the session at different times, making it difficult for a user to precisely determine exactly who is participating in a session at any given time.
One of the reasons for this is that different client applications on the same mobile telephone are typically independent from one another and generally lack any means of communication between them. Thus typically an SMS client application has no way of communicating with the push-to-talk client application for determining the current users of the session.
One way of overcoming this problem would be to redesign the client applications to provide the necessary interoperability. However, as previously mentioned, upgrading existing handsets is somewhat undesirable. Even if such a redesign were to take place, such improved client applications would typically only be available on new mobile telephones, leaving the vast majority of legacy mobile telephones unable to take advantage of such improvements.
Consequently, there is a need to provide a way of enabling users of mobile telephones to ‘share’ sessions between different communication services, without requiring modification to existing client applications.